How to Be Human Read online

  The room appeared exactly as she had left it. Which was good. But the untouched wine struck her as an oversight. Mary tossed her book on the sofa and poured a large glass. She rested a hand on the mantelpiece. A couple of sips to steady herself, and she would go up.

  Tonight was the first time she had been in this room since Eric and Michelle had decorated. When she and Mark had brought round a bottle of wine to welcome their new neighbors one spring evening four years ago, the wallpaper had been of an entirely different kind, and they had all laughed at the late Mrs. Brown’s taste in interiors. They had stood, she remembered, in the way that people stand at a party, though there had been only four of them, upright and wooden like knitting dolls. They had found things in common: she and Eric were only children. Someone Michelle knew used to work for the same firm of surveyors as Mark. At the end they vowed to get together soon. Mary swilled another mouthful. Of course, they never had.

  Most of all, what she remembered about that evening was a feeling of immense validation. She and Mark had enviable local knowledge. At thirty, they were already old hands. They had held their silence on the short walk home and, as soon as their own door was behind them, broken into giggles. They had chosen and bought an excellent house before Hackney was obviously excellent, and other young professional people like them were following suit, a whole year later, with prices a whole year higher. They would never have been able to afford it now. And also, though neither of them had said so, for all those reasons they felt more impressive as a couple, more together. It was as if they predated their new neighbors in every way. They were still in their blissful period then. Mary shut her eyes when the next memory came. Later that evening she had asked Mark if he thought Eric and Michelle would last. It was only when George was born that she realized Michelle must have already been pregnant.

  Mary emptied her glass and put it on the table. What was she doing, standing around daydreaming when there was responsible babysitting to do? She had never been upstairs before, and she winced as each step creaked, the sound rising like the inflection of a question. Is she allowed up here? If there was a quiet path, she failed to find it. At the half-landing, she turned right and in her spare room found George, bare-chested in pajama shorts, the duvet kicked off. He was sleeping with his mouth open, and Mary realized that she had no idea what checking on a child entailed. Was it too sinister to make sure he was breathing? She cupped one hand close to his lips and after a moment felt her skin glow with heat, then fade, then glow again.

  She was about to return along the landing toward Flora’s when she noticed that the door to Eric and Michelle’s bedroom stood ajar. She toed it open, and the edge of a single mattress came into view on the floor beside the bed. Was that for Eric? The sheets were mussed up, the room a total mess. Packets of nappies, used tissues, biscuit wrappers, a stew of clothes everywhere, odors thickening in the gloom of drawn curtains. She had lifted the lid on the tangled heart of the house, and it looked nothing like the immaculate lounge. She pulled the door to and took a deep lug of air.

  At the other end of the landing, in her study, Mary found Flora, doll arms poking out of a long white sleeping bag. It was stuffy in here too, so Mary parted the curtains and gave the fanlight a sharp push. Liberating, to open windows in someone else’s house. The side rail of the cot had been left in the lowered position, and when Mary tried to raise it, she realized it was broken. No matter. That made it easier to lean in. She placed her hand on Flora’s head. It was surprisingly hard in its warmth, and the impression it made, above all else, was of persistence. The thrum of a pulse pushed at Mary’s palm like bubbles rising to the surface. Next to Flora’s young skin her hands looked so old. They were covered in a mesh of faint lines, as if someone had Spirographed over them, a pattern of aging to come.

  In contrast, Flora’s face was beautiful, her closed eyelids edged with straight, dark lashes. Mary touched the baby’s cheek, and as if a button had been pressed, the lids pinged open and two deep-gray eyes looked up at a face that didn’t belong. The child murmured, half asleep. Her little legs kicked inside her sleeping pouch, and she began to whimper. “Husssshhh. Husssshhh,” Mary said, in line with Michelle’s instructions. She was meant to pat the baby’s back at the same time, but the baby was lying on her back. So she placed her hand on the eyelids instead and held them fast. “Sleep time,” she said, stroking the lids firmly shut. But each time she lifted her hand for a new stroke, the eyes reopened.

  The whimper grew louder, lengthened, became a proper cry. Mary didn’t want George to wake too, so she unpopped the shoulders of the sleeping bag and peeled back the envelope to reveal Flora’s tiny legs. Eric and Michelle had said nothing about having to pick up the children, let alone how to do it. “One last chance to go quiet,” Mary warned as she slid her hands under the baby, but Flora gave a loud wail, and Mary began to lift. Head, legs, arms … Everything rolled in different directions. Shifting her hands one way, then the other, as if at the wheel of a three-point turn, Mary managed to catch the head and get the baby vertical. Flora’s body locked onto her own and instantly stilled. The cry faltered. Mary rubbed her nose on the baby’s head. What a satisfying nuzzling of cartilage and bone. Its hardness was the comfort.

  “There, there, there. I’m Mary from next door, remember? Mummy and Daddy’s friend,” she said, grateful that Flora couldn’t speak. She was unsure her fitness for duty would have borne interrogation. “I’m looking after you and George.”

  The next part was not on the list of Michelle’s instructions.

  Mary set off slowly down the stairs, crablike, feeling for each step. “We’ll have a little wander,” she said to the hot hair that pressed her cheek. She planned to take the baby to a place of quiet and headed for the dining room, at the back of the house. “Now, now, it’s sleep time, Flora,” she said, patting the baby’s back. Saying the child’s name made her feel more convincing. She pushed down the door handle with her elbow. The air was so solidly warm it barely budged for her; she had to force her way through it, while it fetched itself up her nose and down her throat. There was more extravagantly leafy wallpaper, which only exacerbated the impression of jungly heat.

  The room was in early twilight, the same gently darkening blue as the world outside. Mary and Flora stood before the patio doors, fathoming the murky shapes of Michelle and Eric’s shrubs. Unlike Mary’s garden, everything here had been kept to an appropriate size. “There you see,” she said in a lullaby voice, “the birds have gone to sleep. Mr. Squirrel has gone to sleep.” She turned to show Flora the view. “Neville’s cat has gone to sleep.” She caught sight of her own reflection. She had made the right choice with that dress. Midnight blue—so good with her chestnut hair. But how faint her face looked in the glass, an apparition not fully formed, an intermediary between herself and the outside world.

  Further back in the garden, something moved to disturb the reflection, its movement, even at that distance, immediately claiming the foreground. As the fox came into view, acquiring substance, her own face and Flora’s seemed to recede. He was running at speed, supplanting them in the window. It hadn’t occurred to Mary that he visited other back gardens too. But perhaps he didn’t and had come only because he knew she was there. Something dangled between his jaws, pink and flipping. Her right foot took a step back, then her left, instinctively trying to reinstate lost distance. He was coming closer to the glass than she was now. She watched him step through her reflection.

  He hit the patio doors, two forepaws on the pane, the hard firm thud of hairy footpads, the tap of claws. Impatient. Now there was only the fox in the glass, and the pink thing, which was his tongue, pointed at its tip like an arrow. She saw the black speckles on the white of his muzzle where whiskers sprouted, the lustrous hair on his chest. His front legs, propped against the door, in this posture resembled arms. They were bushier at the top and short-haired from the joints down, as if he had pushed up his shirtsleeves of fur and left himself bare below the elbow, like
a doctor at the bedside. He looked capable, ready to attend. Up close, his eyes, which she had read as dark in her own garden, were in fact pale amber and rimmed with liquid black: the eye makeup of a New Romantic.

  They were examining her now. Not shy or frightened or, as she had heard people say of dogs making eye contact with a human, judging his chances in a fight. The look was more of … keen appraisal. One ear bent down and up, then the other, flagging the movement of his eyes. Mary watched them shift from left to right, and back again, as if he were reading lines on a page, wondering what she was doing, in this home that was not her home, with this baby that was not her baby.

  He hadn’t seen her before in this leaf-walled place.

  So.

  This was where she was hiding.

  Strange hideout.

  He could look in. But not go in. His snout nudged the window. Open / not open. Hard as a frozen puddle but hot and dry and anyway. Not the season for ice. Nudged the window. Dark with the grass and leaves and everything in his place moving in / over the human den with the humans watching him. Watching them. Watching him. Watching. Human Female lively at last. Been going round with her head stuck in a limbpit, the time it took her to see him but. She saw him now. Check the flicker in her eye.

  An eye that keeps looking without legs that jump is a yes!

  He swiped an ear at a hum. Adjusted hind paws. Stretched his neck.

  High up, a window folded out like a giant cat flap. Sweet food promises fell down like fruit from the tree. He caught them with his tongue, and the promise lifted his tail.

  Mary adjusted her grip on Flora to liberate a hand. She waved it in a broad salutation, mimicking the arc he was making with his tail. “And good evening to you too,” she said. That seemed to be the gist of it.

  He was still staring at her, so she said, not expecting an answer, “I assume it’s you who’s been bringing me things? Dirty old boxers I can do without, thanks. And you can keep your paws off my sandals.” His head continued to nod on the other side of the patio door. She felt certain now that he had been looking for her. Me, me, me, she cautioned herself. This is what happened when you were single: too much time to think about yourself. The world shrank to fit. A gnat danced between them—Mary was unsure which side of the glass—and broke their exchange.

  His snout began to follow the movement of the insect, the black tip of his muzzle tracing wibbly loops in the air. Clap, his claws slapped the window.

  And.

  Waited.

  To lift his paw.

  Tongue slid ready.

  While the gnat flew free inside the human den, and his claws skated after it, over the little face and the big face, down where the legs of the infant dangled, foot pads shining limp and pearly and pale, fine veins glimmering. His head bobbed. In the wall of the pen that was there / not there. The gnat landed on the Female’s skin. Thirsting for blood. His tongue overlapped her as he gave the invisible window wall a lick.

  The wet smear on the patio door seemed to Mary proof that he wanted something, that he was reaching out to her. His body, so comprehensively attentive, expressed the same desire, the same sense that he was here at the window with a particular intention. She scratched at an itch on her arm. There was nothing accidental about him, neither his behavior nor the way he looked. He was beautiful by design, as if his shape answered a special purpose. His leather pads pushed flat on the glass, and between them his fur flared into five tufty points of a star. His isosceles ears lined up with the bridge of his nose; his eyes and the black circle of his snout made three corners of a triangle.

  “Flora, meet Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox, meet Flora,” she whispered.

  He stood still and looked past her, as if seeing only now the Ercol-style sideboard and matching dining table, a porcelain lamp in the shape of a bulldog—they would have got that in Islington—with a pleated shade on its head. He was examining the room unhurriedly, without embarrassment, and for the second time this week Mary felt a little slighted to see that his greater interest lay elsewhere. She put her right hand on the glass and tapped a few times with her fingernails—not hard like a rap, more like a sound for “Can I come in?”

  He registered the knock and stood gallantly down. One forepaw slid to the ground in the join between the door and the adjacent pane, as if he were feeling for a handle. Mary had the impression he nodded. She knocked again, thinking he must have misunderstood and thought she was telling him to leave, but he was already darkening. She waited to see where he would go next, but he walked his shadow into the shadows at the end of the garden, and it was impossible to tell if he had gone over the back to the woods, right toward her place, or left toward Neville’s.

  Mary gazed down at Flora then. Somehow, having been seen with the baby made Mary feel more with the baby. She had lulled Flora to sleep, and he had seen her do it. The sleep and his seeing it, without any big show of having done so, had created in her a little bud of thought. With Mark, it had seemed absurd to plan a new life when she hadn’t sorted out her own. Maybe if she’d got Dawn’s job, made time for the master’s degree she’d always talked about, she would have felt different. The magazines were full of stories of women choosing between their career and their maternal instincts. But what if you had neither? What if you were still waiting? “That wouldn’t have been a good start for either of us,” she said, resting her brow on Flora’s scalp.

  Her mind reeled back to New Year’s Day when her and Mark’s argument, about to enter its second year, had finally boiled over. It was their last proper fight, the one that had produced the irrefutable evidence that they had reached the end, and after which their demise was purely administrative. Up and down the stairs they had chased and shouted—they always argued on the stairs, one of them trying to escape the other. No, she didn’t want to set a date for the wedding. No, she didn’t want kids. He cornered her in the bedroom, by the wardrobe. He wanted to try for a baby. New year, new life, he said. The same old argument. She wasn’t ready. She always said that. Well, he always asked. Maybe if he left her alone … He’d tried that. Not for long enough. The wardrobe pressing her back. His words goading her, his eyes cold as blades. She shivered to remember. She had seen things in both of them that day that she hadn’t known existed.

  Mary carried Flora up to bed and snapped her gently inside her sleeping bag. Then she pulled the fanlight closed. The blue of the sky was thickening, and when Mary returned to the lounge, she shut that window too and refastened both latches. She heard the cat come into the kitchen.

  Michelle and Eric would be back soon, and Mary had the curious sensation that she was erasing all proof of her visit, making herself as elusive as the half-face in the window. She switched on the fan, plumped the sofa cushions. It was absurd to feel guilty, but she went about these jobs with the nagging sense that she was faking the scene. She ate a biscuit and slipped another into her pocket to save worrying about food later. The next glass of wine took her down to a third of the bottle—the amount she had thought, prior to unscrewing the cap, acceptable for three hours of responsible babysitting (there being no limit specified by the bottle or Michelle’s instructions). She sat on the sofa and started doodling on the edge of the notes. She drew three small dots, the corners of a triangle: two at the top for the eyes, one at the bottom for the nose. Somewhere in that geometric puzzle of a face was an answer for her, if she could only find it. His features were diagrammatic, like part of an equation, , she knew those dots had a mathematical meaning, tucked somewhere inside an old schoolbook, but she had no idea what. It was only later, when she looked it up on her phone, that she found they were the symbol for “because.” She drew two triangles on top of it all for his ears. It looked pretty good, so she drew another and another. Each fox was slightly different, but they all said the same thing. Because, because, because.

  Outside, the street was raising a murmur, dribs and drabs heading down the road to the next stage of their Saturday night. Mary turned from the window and caught hersel
f in the mirror above the sofa. Michelle and Eric were tall, and the frame cut her off just below the neck, as if her face were a stone that had sunk to the bottom of a vessel. She wondered what she and Mark had looked like from here, to Eric and Michelle—and how many of their rages her neighbors had heard through the writhing stems and antlers. It seemed reasonable to assume they had heard the ones that ended with Mark’s head or fist banging the wall.

  They had argued and argued, but there was no arguing away the fact that they had been engaged for more than four years, and engagement had led them no closer to marriage. She infuriated him, but his fury only made her delay further. Each time she thought “No” or “Yes but not with you,” she failed to free the thought. Her mouth was a cage that kept Mark out, but only by locking her in. His humors, good and bad, and the quick shifts between, were the walls of their relationship. They held them both in place.

  She looked up at the ceiling, thinking again of their last fight, in the same room as the room above her head, in their house that was now her house. Slowly she turned Granny Joan’s diamond on her right hand. She had waited until the last minute, after the valuation, to tell Mark about her inheritance. He had been hassling her to pack, but with a mortgage there was just enough to buy him out. Meanwhile, he got to live with his parents. Last month a postcard arrived. The oast houses of Kent.

  She was still waiting for him to remove his things from her head.

  * * *

  MICHELLE CAME IN first, keenly scanning the wine bottle and biscuit plate in order to make her own deductions about what was different. “Everything OK?”

  “All fine. Not a peep from either of them.” Flora and George were asleep. What did the rest matter?